A Contrastive Study Of Thematic Structures In Both Chinese And American College Students' Speeches

Contrastive analysis has been explored by many scholars for more than five decades, and it greatly facilitates translation and language teaching. Nowadays it is a tendency to do research on the contrastive analysis on textual level rather than sentential level. Particularly,investigations on contrastive analysis of Chinese and English texts have aroused many Chinese scholars'interest. As one hot topic, Theme-Rheme theory also attracts increasing attention of scholars in linguistic field at home and abroad. With this trend of discourse analysis, this thesis aims to do a contrastive study on Chinese and American college students'speech texts within the framework of theme and thematic progression patterns.The theory of Theme-Rheme structure in systemic-functional linguistics developed from the Prague School approach, and several modifications have been made later. The thesis is to apply British linguist M. A. K. Halliday's thematic theory and Danes'patterns of thematic progression to the study of English and Chinese speech texts, with the aim to expose the constituents as themes in them, and also to find out the main thematic progression patterns in speech texts. The author tends to testify how important a role the thematic progression plays in the development of topic as one of text cohesive devices. To achieve this goal, 30 winning speeches are chosen from Chinese and American college students'speech contests. These speeches are analyzed within the framework of Halliday's thematic theory and Danes'thematic progression. After that, the similarities and differences in constituents as themes and thematic progression patterns will be analyzed.Through careful comparative analysis of the thematic structures in the samples, it is found that the thematic structures in both languages have a lot in common since the samples are in the same genre. Meanwhile the samples possess some features different from each other since they are in distinct languages. Firstly, the main constituents used as themes are similar in English and Chinese speeches, which include noun or nominal group, pronoun, prepositional group, adverbial group and verbs or verbal groups. However, the percentages of them are different in English and Chinese speeches because of the differences of language and speakers. Secondly, the main thematic progression patterns in both languages are simple linear TP, TP with a constant Theme, TP with a split rheme and TP with a constant rheme from high to low in speeches. All these analyses further testify the important role of thematic progression as a cohesion device in speeches. It is pointed out that simple linear TP occupies the first position in Chinese speeches, which is followed by TP with a constant theme and TP with a split rheme in similar percentage. TP with a constant rheme appears less in Chinese speeches than in English ones. Finally, the frequency of the same TPP differs between Chinese and English speeches. The reasons for these differences are also discussed in the thesis.At last, the thesis explores the implication of this study for English speech writing, and also puts forward some suggestions to English learning on text level.